*Apologies for Cross-posting*
Press Release
Lund, Sweden - 23 April 2008
SPARC Europe and the Directory of Open Access Journals
Announce
the Launch of the SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access
Journals
Seal to Set Standards for Open Access Journals
For more information, contact: David Prosser,
david.prosser bodley.ox.ac.uk or Lars Bjornshauge,
lars.bjornshaugelub.lu.se
Oxford, UK and Lund, Sweden - SPARC Europe (Scholarly
Publishing
and Academic Resources Coalition), a leading organization of
European research libraries, and the Directory of Open
Access
Journals (DOAJ), Lund University Libraries today announced
the
launch of the SPARC Europe Seal for Open Access journals.
Growing numbers of peer-reviewed research journals are
opening-up
their content online, removing access barriers and allowing
all
interested readers the opportunity of reading the papers
online,
with over 3300 such journals listed in the DOAJ, hosted by
Lund
University Libraries in Sweden.
However, the maximum benefit from this wonderful resource is
not
being realised as confusion surrounds the use and reuse of
material published in such journals. Increasingly,
researchers
wish to mine large segments of the literature to discover
new,
unimagined connections and relationships. Librarians wish to
host
material locally for preservation purposes. Greater clarity
will
bring benefits to authors, users, and journals.
In order for open access journals to be even more useful and
thus
receive more exposure and provide more value to the research
community it is very important that open access journals
offer
standardized, easily retrievable information about what
kinds of
reuse are allowed. Therefore, we are advising that all
journals
provide clear and unambiguous statements regarding the
copyright
statement of the papers they publish. To qualify for the
SPARC
Europe Seal a journal must use the Creative Commons By
(CC-BY)
license which is the most user-friendly license and
corresponds
to the ethos of the Budapest Open Access Initiative.
The second strand of the Seal is that journals should
provide
metadata for all their articles to the DOAJ, who will then
make
the metadata OAI-compliant. This will increase the
visibility of
the papers and allow OAI-harvesters to include details of
the
journal articles in their services.
"We want to build on the great work already done by the
publishers of many open access journals and improve the
standards
of open access titles," said David Prosser, Director of
SPARC
Europe. "Working with the DOAJ means that we can
provide help
and guidance to journals who wish to move beyond the first
step
of free access to full open access and our long-term aim is
to
ensure that all journals listed in the DOAJ can attain the
standards expressed within the Seal."
"Improving the standards of the rapidly increasing
numbers of
open access and contributing to the widest possible
visibility,
dissemination and readership of the journals is very much in
line
with our mission," said Lars Bjornshauge, Director of
Libraries
at Lund University. "We are very happy to see the
enormous usage
of the DOAJ and the support from our membership."
"Legal certainty is essential to the emergence of an
internet
that
supports
research. The proliferation of license terms forces
researchers to act
like
lawyers, and slows innovative educational and scientific
uses of the
scholarly canon," said Johan Wilbanks, Executive
Director of
Science
Commons.
"Using a seal to reward the journals who choose to
adopt policies
that
ensure users' rights to innovate is a great idea. It builds
on a culture
of
trust rather than a culture of control, and it will make it
easy to find
the
"This is an excellent program with two important
recommendations.
CC-BY licenses make OA journals more useful, and
interoperable
metadata make them more discoverable. The recommendations
are
easy to adopt and will accelerate research, facilitate
preservation, and make OA journal policies more open and
more
predictable for users. I hope all OA journals will adopt
them
--not to get the Seal from SPARC Europe and the DOAJ, but
for the
same reasons that moved these organizations to launch the
program: to make OA journals more visible and useful than
they
already are," said Peter Suber, Open Access Advocate
& Author of
Open Access News.
SPARC Europe is an alliance of 110 research-led university
libraries from 14 European countries. It is affiliated with
SPARC
based in Washington, D.C., which represents over 200
institutions, mainly in North America. SPARC Europe and
SPARC
work to develop and promote new models of scholarly
communication
that increase the access to and utility of the research
literature.
Lund University Libraries has developed a number of digital
library services and has been operating the Directory of
Open
Access Journals since May 2003 starting with 300 journals.
Now
more than 3300 open access journals are listed in the DOAJ.
The
development and operation of the DOAJ is entirely dependent
on
the support from sponsors and members. The introduction of
the
SPARC Europe Seal will generate more work, which means that
more
support is needed. Join the increasing number of
individuals,
universities, research centres & library consortia how
have
already signed up for membership here: http://www.doaj.org/.
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